I'm thinking I should bookmark this and use it as an example to anyone who claims ISPs won't attempt to charge websites for "prioritized" delivery, and degrade people who don't pay up.
In short: They already have.
Of course, I don't think net neutrality legislation will cover email -- not that I care much, I really don't send mail to many people at AOL -- but it's just a perfect example to all the Libertarian idiots out there of why we do need government intervention sometimes.
That is what Microsoft would do if they were serious about interoperability with anyone. They'd support ODF -- natively, not through some third-party open source plugin. They'd drop OpenXML. And they'd stop lobbying governments who want to stardardize on a real document format.
Or, hell, send some developers over to the Wine project.
Since none of this is happening, I can only assume that this "Linux interoperability" guy is either a complete hypocrite, or is going to have no real power within the company.
After enough years of use, don't you think someone would've noticed if ZFS didn't come with the equivalent of fsck?
I'll bet money that ZFS will be both more reliable, and easier to recover than HFS+, except that it may take a little while before someone has a recovery GUI for you. Probably not, though -- it'll probably be in Disk Utility in the first release.
I actually don't care about the results, one way or the other.
I care about accuracy.
Think about it: If a newspaper made some reference to me being a "family man", when I'm single -- or "single and looking", when I'm happily married -- shouldn't I take offense that they didn't even bother to get the basic facts right?
Parent is right. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk. If you're guessing, say so, or find out for sure.
It's really not that hard to figure out that NeoOffice is not an X11 app. If he knew enough to comment on the existance of X11 in the first place, he certainly knew enough to figure out whether a particular app was X11 or not.
First, you don't have to DIY your Linux anymore. Just grab an Ubuntu/Kubuntu CD, boot, and go. Or buy an Ubuntu Dell, probably cheaper than that Mac. If you could compile mplayer yourself, you're already more than skilled enough to handle, say, enabling repositories required to install Beryl.
Second, I've found just the same in reverse -- the most useful Mac stuff is on Linux, so until the Mac offers something compelling beyond simply polish, I won't switch.
I understand what you mean by RAID3. Tell me again why RAID5 does not work on 3 disks as I've described, especially when (using Linux MD) I've specifically asked it for a RAID5 array, and not RAID3.
If a game is going to require you to drop $50 on the game and $200 on a video card, another $40 or so to buy an optical drive really isn't much. That's $40 or so for a DVD burner; you could probably spend less than $20 now for a cheap DVD-ROM drive -- less than the game itself!
Any games I ever release (probably indie/homebrew) will be on CDs only if they fit on less than one CD. Otherwise, DVDs, or a later standard.
Just pop it up through a Steam update, that also provides a convenient wrapper around the nVidia/ATI driver downloads/installers. Note that nVidia, at least, does not actually provide any kind of auto-update for their drivers, so Steam is as good a place to do that as any.
There are other differences that I'm sure others will point out, but for now, NeoOffice works and is reasonably stable, although dog-slow -- but what do you expect from OpenOffice?
The native OpenOffice port, from what they are telling me, is very much alpha quality right now.
First, if you can help it, don't use FUSE. It'd work for the media center, for now, but I don't think a filesystem is the right place to say "We'll do it quick and dirty, it doesn't have to perform well." I am doing a project in FUSE, but said project is designed to go over the Internet -- similar to GmailFS.
The only advantage of FUSE, in this case, is that it would be portable -- as in, Linux and OS X, and maybe Solaris, BSD, and Windows eventually.
Second, don't use PAR2. Something similar, yes, but PAR2 itself is obscenely slow, last I checked. As in, may actually be too slow even with your assumptions about performance (FUSE would work, PAR2 would not). I realize you probably only meant it as an analogy, just thought I'd warn you.
Third, you will want to restripe things to some extent. It could be done atomically (no risk of failure), but suppose you start with one disk, say, and then add another. You're going to want all your files mirrored onto the second disk, so that either disk can fail. If you then add a third, you'll want to convert to RAID5 -- stripe across the first two disks, parity on the third -- so that any disk can fail, but you still have as much space as you can. Add a fourth disk, and you might want to restripe that one file -- but since this is at the FS level, you can use free/temporary space, even copy the whole file at a time if it's small enough.
Or, as you say, don't stripe it across every disk -- but the fewer you stripe it across, the more space you're wasting to parity (or a full copy of the file).
And finally, you might consider not doing it quick-and-dirty. As just a small example, ZFS fragments badly enough on its own, and I imagine this would be worse.
I'd also suggest a background process that does random checks, so that you don't come back to access a file a year after you saved it, only to find it gone.
But I do have to agree with you -- filesystem design is basically dead now. Reiser4 had me excited for awhile, but now the project seems dead, and never really held much promise for more than just a really fast local FS with FUSE-like toys attached to it. I badly want to write a filesystem, but at the same time, C sucks, and it's the best we've got for FS design. Sometimes I just have to stop myself from rewriting everything...
With the amount of storage I buy these days, I wouldn't bother so much...
I'd just start out with a few discs, at least 3 for RAID5, maybe more. Then, when I need more storage, I have a choice -- if I only need, say, 500 gigs more (and I have an array of 500 gig drives), I can just add it on to the existing array and restripe. If I need a LOT more, I could build a new array, but keep the existing one around, either for backup, or just to have a bunch of storage.
Software RAID uses more CPU time, by far, vs. hardware.
It's not significantly more.
Yes, it's more, but it's kind of like disk compression -- a filesystem running lzo compression, and doing it properly, will likely be FASTER than the same filesystem without compression, because even with all that CPU, it's still disk-bound.
And on a personal server, anything that's disk-bound is fast enough.
You must admit, though the Linux methods & abilities you extoll are flexible, that software level RAID is a poor substitute for GOOD hardware (and you do usually get what you pay for in things computing).
I'd have to see benchmarks. But remember, it's a performance/price ratio...
AND, Yes, it cost me a pretty penny! HOWEVER: it cost far less than high-end Adaptec Ultra-ScSi units would between their caching controllers (huge amounts of memory possible on them though, the types you see in "industrial environs" (db servers for large companies))!
Great. Did it cost you more than an upgrade to a dual-core CPU? Or a whole separate processor? Or the difference between a single-core and dual-core, or between 32-bit and 64-bit?
Or what about a whole separate computer? Just have a dedicated fileserver with enough CPU to handle the RAID, and connect to it over gigabit?
I would say that, if you now have a lot of spare CPU cycles, you've wasted your money. I could be entirely wrong -- maybe you have done the benchmarks, and maybe you do have the kind of insane load it would take, but most of the time, hardware RAID is a waste.
Did it for a friend recently. Also, currently on ubuntu + dmraid on my own desktop (I dual-boot with Windows on a RAID0 array, because I'm a cheap bastard).
I recommend Ubuntu unless you have a good, specific reason not to, because it's easy, popular, and reasonably up-to-date.
I'd also recommend using NFS and/or Samba to share it, unless I'm missing something important. In particular, NFS lets you tune for jumbo frames, to get the performance you expect from Gigabit.
This is what you do: buy 2 drives exactly the same size and mirror them. End of story.
Until another few years go by and you want to buy more storage. Then you're basically stuck with doubling it, clumsily -- or migrating away and essentially throwing out the old drives.
RAID 5 is better in the short run. Even with a three disc array, you're getting more storage for your money, and you can always restripe it onto a fourth disc.
(If you need more than 500 GB I would highly suggest encoding your porn into a different format than MPEG2)
It's not all porn, and some of it is high def, in h.264. And I don't even edit videos, I just watch 'em.
With computers, the stupidest thing you can do is spend extra money to prepare for your needs for tomorrow.
That is true. However, I would fill a terabyte easily, and right now, I'm guessing it's cheaper to buy three 500 gig drives than two 1 tb drives.
By the way RAID 5 is a pain in the ass unless you have physical hotswap capability, which I highly doubt.
You highly doubt he's got SATA?
The one thing I will say is, either have another disk (even a USB thumb drive) to boot off of, or do some sort of RAID1 across them. You almost certainly want software RAID on Linux, and you don't want to try to teach a BIOS to boot off of your array.
My understanding is, Transmeta actually ran an entirely different chip under the hood, and emulated x86 on the fly (with help from hardware).
This is entirely different -- it's about having the software be able to more tightly communicate with the hardware. To paraphrase someone else's post: It's so the hardware can know the difference between "I'm just waking up to poll something, keep everything low-power" and "OMG ramp it up to full lap-burning power NOW!!!"
I find that CS women look just like women everywhere else on campus. The only significant difference is that there are so few of them, but both of the girls in my freshman CS course were hot enough.
Really, the stereotype of "geek" for either sex is entirely obsolete now.
I'm still not amazingly impressed with what you told me... just kind of a "meh". But what bothers me is just how amazingly bad the article is:
a middle layer between hardware and software that can translate and communicate between software and hardware, allowing for cooperative problem solving.
Wow, sounds just like firmware. That or drivers, depending on your definition.
This middle layer would allow software to adapt to the hardware its running on, something engineers have not been able to do in the past,
Ok, now it sounds like a compiler (and architecture-specific compiler flags), and/or drivers.
Hazelwood cites a famous Intel mishap where microprocessors were distributed before a flaw in their fine mathematics function was detected, resulting in a massive recall. A system like Tortola could prevent such expensive glitches in the future.
What's this? A better way of debugging hardware? Maybe even reprogrammable hardware (like having a chip fab in your box)?
Nope, not even close:
We could use the software to hide flaws in the hardware, which would allow designers to release products sooner because problems could be fixed later,
Ok, this would be roughly like simply telling Linux to emulate a math coprocessor, or to emulate the math coprocessor only for the instructions that aren't accurate, and only on a Pentium. I'm not sure, but I think they do this already.
Except, this strikes me as a truly irresponsible way of handling this, bordering on fraud. You paid for a chunk of hardware, and due to a defect, you don't have certain functionality. You can emulate that in software for a performance hit, but really, you were robbed, and you should be able to get a refund/replacement.
Let me put it another way: Suppose someone shipped a video card which didn't work. At all. And when someone pointed this out to them, they shrug and release "updated drivers" which simply run a software renderer. Would you call that progress, or would you call it fraud?
So, turns out that she actually did something cool, but with an article like that, I might never have known. I'd say that an article like that actually hurts more than it helps -- if they had thrown a few more technical terms in there, it might've confused me, but I'd at least be paying attention and looking for more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking I should bookmark this and use it as an example to anyone who claims ISPs won't attempt to charge websites for "prioritized" delivery, and degrade people who don't pay up.
In short: They already have.
Of course, I don't think net neutrality legislation will cover email -- not that I care much, I really don't send mail to many people at AOL -- but it's just a perfect example to all the Libertarian idiots out there of why we do need government intervention sometimes.
The free market will sort it out? Sure...
That is what Microsoft would do if they were serious about interoperability with anyone. They'd support ODF -- natively, not through some third-party open source plugin. They'd drop OpenXML. And they'd stop lobbying governments who want to stardardize on a real document format.
Or, hell, send some developers over to the Wine project.
Since none of this is happening, I can only assume that this "Linux interoperability" guy is either a complete hypocrite, or is going to have no real power within the company.
After enough years of use, don't you think someone would've noticed if ZFS didn't come with the equivalent of fsck?
I'll bet money that ZFS will be both more reliable, and easier to recover than HFS+, except that it may take a little while before someone has a recovery GUI for you. Probably not, though -- it'll probably be in Disk Utility in the first release.
Why would you possibly prefer HFS+ to... well... anything else that OSX might support? Except maybe FAT32...
I actually don't care about the results, one way or the other.
I care about accuracy.
Think about it: If a newspaper made some reference to me being a "family man", when I'm single -- or "single and looking", when I'm happily married -- shouldn't I take offense that they didn't even bother to get the basic facts right?
Parent is right. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk. If you're guessing, say so, or find out for sure.
It's really not that hard to figure out that NeoOffice is not an X11 app. If he knew enough to comment on the existance of X11 in the first place, he certainly knew enough to figure out whether a particular app was X11 or not.
First, you don't have to DIY your Linux anymore. Just grab an Ubuntu/Kubuntu CD, boot, and go. Or buy an Ubuntu Dell, probably cheaper than that Mac. If you could compile mplayer yourself, you're already more than skilled enough to handle, say, enabling repositories required to install Beryl.
Second, I've found just the same in reverse -- the most useful Mac stuff is on Linux, so until the Mac offers something compelling beyond simply polish, I won't switch.
I understand what you mean by RAID3. Tell me again why RAID5 does not work on 3 disks as I've described, especially when (using Linux MD) I've specifically asked it for a RAID5 array, and not RAID3.
Thanks for that, glad I haven't actually had to try hotplugging anything yet.
How do you check whether a particular drive/controller/PSU is ready for SATA hotplug?
If a game is going to require you to drop $50 on the game and $200 on a video card, another $40 or so to buy an optical drive really isn't much. That's $40 or so for a DVD burner; you could probably spend less than $20 now for a cheap DVD-ROM drive -- less than the game itself!
Any games I ever release (probably indie/homebrew) will be on CDs only if they fit on less than one CD. Otherwise, DVDs, or a later standard.
It's true, the 360 actually hasn't gone HD-DVD yet.
To clarify, I'm guessing that by the time PC games finally standardize on DVD, there will probably be more than a few 360 games that are HD-DVD only.
Just pop it up through a Steam update, that also provides a convenient wrapper around the nVidia/ATI driver downloads/installers. Note that nVidia, at least, does not actually provide any kind of auto-update for their drivers, so Steam is as good a place to do that as any.
There are other differences that I'm sure others will point out, but for now, NeoOffice works and is reasonably stable, although dog-slow -- but what do you expect from OpenOffice?
The native OpenOffice port, from what they are telling me, is very much alpha quality right now.
With 95% of these people owning DVD drives, can we please move to DVD-ROM as an industry standard, and drop support for the 10-CD-in-a-box versions?
(Just in time for the PS3 and xbox 360 to go to HD formats, or in other words, about damned time!)
Am I to understand that exactly one person has tried running a Valve game on a Transmeta processor?
What is it about 3 disks that makes it RAID3? Or, in other words, what's stopping it from doing what I understand to be RAID5:
DDP
DPD
PDD
DDP
DPD
PDD
(D = data, P = parity)
First, if you can help it, don't use FUSE. It'd work for the media center, for now, but I don't think a filesystem is the right place to say "We'll do it quick and dirty, it doesn't have to perform well." I am doing a project in FUSE, but said project is designed to go over the Internet -- similar to GmailFS.
The only advantage of FUSE, in this case, is that it would be portable -- as in, Linux and OS X, and maybe Solaris, BSD, and Windows eventually.
Second, don't use PAR2. Something similar, yes, but PAR2 itself is obscenely slow, last I checked. As in, may actually be too slow even with your assumptions about performance (FUSE would work, PAR2 would not). I realize you probably only meant it as an analogy, just thought I'd warn you.
Third, you will want to restripe things to some extent. It could be done atomically (no risk of failure), but suppose you start with one disk, say, and then add another. You're going to want all your files mirrored onto the second disk, so that either disk can fail. If you then add a third, you'll want to convert to RAID5 -- stripe across the first two disks, parity on the third -- so that any disk can fail, but you still have as much space as you can. Add a fourth disk, and you might want to restripe that one file -- but since this is at the FS level, you can use free/temporary space, even copy the whole file at a time if it's small enough.
Or, as you say, don't stripe it across every disk -- but the fewer you stripe it across, the more space you're wasting to parity (or a full copy of the file).
And finally, you might consider not doing it quick-and-dirty. As just a small example, ZFS fragments badly enough on its own, and I imagine this would be worse.
I'd also suggest a background process that does random checks, so that you don't come back to access a file a year after you saved it, only to find it gone.
But I do have to agree with you -- filesystem design is basically dead now. Reiser4 had me excited for awhile, but now the project seems dead, and never really held much promise for more than just a really fast local FS with FUSE-like toys attached to it. I badly want to write a filesystem, but at the same time, C sucks, and it's the best we've got for FS design. Sometimes I just have to stop myself from rewriting everything...
Why?
The one advantage you mention is dual-boot. And it's true, that does help -- but you can do that well enough with nVidia's fakeraid.
With the amount of storage I buy these days, I wouldn't bother so much...
I'd just start out with a few discs, at least 3 for RAID5, maybe more. Then, when I need more storage, I have a choice -- if I only need, say, 500 gigs more (and I have an array of 500 gig drives), I can just add it on to the existing array and restripe. If I need a LOT more, I could build a new array, but keep the existing one around, either for backup, or just to have a bunch of storage.
It's not significantly more.
Yes, it's more, but it's kind of like disk compression -- a filesystem running lzo compression, and doing it properly, will likely be FASTER than the same filesystem without compression, because even with all that CPU, it's still disk-bound.
And on a personal server, anything that's disk-bound is fast enough.
I'd have to see benchmarks. But remember, it's a performance/price ratio...
Great. Did it cost you more than an upgrade to a dual-core CPU? Or a whole separate processor? Or the difference between a single-core and dual-core, or between 32-bit and 64-bit?
Or what about a whole separate computer? Just have a dedicated fileserver with enough CPU to handle the RAID, and connect to it over gigabit?
I would say that, if you now have a lot of spare CPU cycles, you've wasted your money. I could be entirely wrong -- maybe you have done the benchmarks, and maybe you do have the kind of insane load it would take, but most of the time, hardware RAID is a waste.
Did it for a friend recently. Also, currently on ubuntu + dmraid on my own desktop (I dual-boot with Windows on a RAID0 array, because I'm a cheap bastard).
I recommend Ubuntu unless you have a good, specific reason not to, because it's easy, popular, and reasonably up-to-date.
I'd also recommend using NFS and/or Samba to share it, unless I'm missing something important. In particular, NFS lets you tune for jumbo frames, to get the performance you expect from Gigabit.
Until another few years go by and you want to buy more storage. Then you're basically stuck with doubling it, clumsily -- or migrating away and essentially throwing out the old drives.
RAID 5 is better in the short run. Even with a three disc array, you're getting more storage for your money, and you can always restripe it onto a fourth disc.
It's not all porn, and some of it is high def, in h.264. And I don't even edit videos, I just watch 'em.
That is true. However, I would fill a terabyte easily, and right now, I'm guessing it's cheaper to buy three 500 gig drives than two 1 tb drives.
You highly doubt he's got SATA?
The one thing I will say is, either have another disk (even a USB thumb drive) to boot off of, or do some sort of RAID1 across them. You almost certainly want software RAID on Linux, and you don't want to try to teach a BIOS to boot off of your array.
My understanding is, Transmeta actually ran an entirely different chip under the hood, and emulated x86 on the fly (with help from hardware).
This is entirely different -- it's about having the software be able to more tightly communicate with the hardware. To paraphrase someone else's post: It's so the hardware can know the difference between "I'm just waking up to poll something, keep everything low-power" and "OMG ramp it up to full lap-burning power NOW!!!"
I find that CS women look just like women everywhere else on campus. The only significant difference is that there are so few of them, but both of the girls in my freshman CS course were hot enough.
Really, the stereotype of "geek" for either sex is entirely obsolete now.
I'm still not amazingly impressed with what you told me... just kind of a "meh". But what bothers me is just how amazingly bad the article is:
Wow, sounds just like firmware. That or drivers, depending on your definition.
Ok, now it sounds like a compiler (and architecture-specific compiler flags), and/or drivers.
What's this? A better way of debugging hardware? Maybe even reprogrammable hardware (like having a chip fab in your box)?
Nope, not even close:
Ok, this would be roughly like simply telling Linux to emulate a math coprocessor, or to emulate the math coprocessor only for the instructions that aren't accurate, and only on a Pentium. I'm not sure, but I think they do this already.
Except, this strikes me as a truly irresponsible way of handling this, bordering on fraud. You paid for a chunk of hardware, and due to a defect, you don't have certain functionality. You can emulate that in software for a performance hit, but really, you were robbed, and you should be able to get a refund/replacement.
Let me put it another way: Suppose someone shipped a video card which didn't work. At all. And when someone pointed this out to them, they shrug and release "updated drivers" which simply run a software renderer. Would you call that progress, or would you call it fraud?
So, turns out that she actually did something cool, but with an article like that, I might never have known. I'd say that an article like that actually hurts more than it helps -- if they had thrown a few more technical terms in there, it might've confused me, but I'd at least be paying attention and looking for more.